Harvard dawdles, Allston waits

OP-ED | Paul McMorrow

June 27, 2011|By Paul McMorrow

IF YOU’RE IN THE HABIT of passing through the Allston tolls, then you’re probably well acquainted with the biggest white elephant in Boston real estate. It’s been a ghost building for 10 years now. Drive by this afternoon, and the hulking steel-and-concrete structure will be doing the same thing it’s done for the past decade: looming over the Mass. Pike, dark and empty and begging to be put to good use.

Get one last look while you still can. After a decade of disuse, the Lincoln Street building has finally found a purpose — as the trade bait in a neighborhood-wide game of Monopoly. The vacant building’s owner, Harvard University, is flipping it for a couple of run-down properties down the street. When the trade is finished, the facility at 176 Lincoln St. will be razed. It’s an ignominious end for a property that has been cursed since the day it opened. And it speaks volumes about the development dynamics in Allston, where commercial development is dominated by a single investor that just happens to be the country’s wealthiest university.

Harvard’s habit of buying up real estate under the cover of darkness has earned it the enmity of many Allston residents. But when it comes to 176 Lincoln St., the massive empty complex overlooking the Pike, the university was supposed to be rescuing the neighborhood from a real estate deal gone terribly wrong.

The Lincoln Street property was originally a pure dot-com bubble play. A developer tried turning a moving-company warehouse into something to sell to the scores of Internet companies that were cropping up along Route 128. The dot-coms disappeared before the building ever opened. What was supposed to be called Boston Internet City was rechristened as a biotech facility. Biotechs never came, though. Companies preferred being in Cambridge, or Lexington, or anywhere other than that terrible concrete box overlooking the Allston tollbooths. So the building sat empty, a concrete shell the size of a city block in the middle of a residential neighborhood.

Harvard scooped up the property in late 2006. The school dropped $16 million on the vacant facility around the same time that it was advancing ambitious plans to create a life sciences hub in Allston. Neighbors assumed the Lincoln Street building factored into Harvard’s life sciences strategy. Why else would the school buy a lab-ready building while making a major push to expand its lab presence?